He started shoveling all of his clothes in his dresser drawers to avoid using the closet. They wouldn’t fit very well but he made it work. He was able to avoid the monster and get on with his life.

His mother came in one morning while he was at school and saw all of his nice clothes stuffed into the few drawers he had. This did not please her. She worked very hard to buy him those clothes and he was treating them like discarded toys. She pulled the extra clothes out of the drawers and opened the closet wide. Nearly all of the hangers were empty and at the bottom of the closet was The Monster, fast asleep. He was green and fury and his eyes fluttered open every time he exhaled, though he was not awake. She nearly shrieked in horror at the sight of the 350-pound mongoloid sleeping in her 7-year-old son’s closet. She backed out of the room and down the hall, and then called her neighbor, a nice handy man who sometimes came over to the apartment to change a light bulb or tighten a screw.

He told her that monsters were not something he could handle and that she would have to call a special exterminator known by the town folk as Monster Removal Services Incorporated. He gave her the number and offered his own apartment as shelter, until the monster was removed. She accepted without hesitation.

When the mother picked up her son from school that afternoon she hugged him long and apologized. She asked why he hadn’t told her about The Monster and he expressed, through tears streaming down his cheeks, that she had told him, “Monsters aren’t real.” “I’m sorry,” his mother said, “in most towns they aren’t real, but this one seems to be an exception to the rule.” They went out for ice cream sundaes and she told him that soon the monster would be gone and all would be back to normal.

It was Friday by the time the Monster Removal Service arrived. They brought a team of six, which was standard practice along with a dart gun full of special tranquilizers reserved for wild animals that became dangerous. The team entered the boy’s bedroom through the fire escape and positioned themselves in the room to shoot. The Monster – having a criminal record for the repeated offense of breaking and entering – stepped outside the closet with his hands up. He simply did not want them to use the tranquilizer – it took him weeks to recover from the shot.

They took The Monster down to county and booked him for trespassing. He was locked up with another monster called Joe who refused to leave a family alone claiming that he couldn’t get enough of their dinners. The Monster posted the $50,000 bail and was slapped with 100 hours of community service for breaking,entering, holing up in a small boy’s closet and scaring the crap out of him.

The mother and son moved back into the apartment on Monday, as the Monster Removal Services team stood guard for a few days to make sure everything was clear. They resumed normal life in no time.

One evening a few weeks later, the mother took her son out to play ice hockey. They rode the bus home that night, as they often did, passing a street where ex-cons picked up litter to earn goodwill or avoid jail time. The boy saw him right away. The Monster – on the side of the road, picking up trash and litter. The boy locked eyes with him in what felt like an eternity. He had nightmares that night and in the morning, when it was time to put his freshly laundered clothes away, he stuffed them all into his few drawers and kept the closet sealed shut.